Past Forgetting: My Memory Lost and Found – A Remarkable Memoir of Brain Injury, Relationships, and Rediscovering Life and Voice

by Jill Robinson

A love story, a mystery, and a memory guide, Past Forgetting shows a writer's determination to re-create her life.Jill Robinson, novelist and author of Bed/Time/Story, wakes from a coma to discover she's lost her memory and just about any sense of who she was.And is. She likes the look of the man standing next to her bed, but doesn't recognize that he's her husband, Stuart. What matters is that she feels safe around him. As she searches the house for her children, she is reminded that her son and daughter are both grown with families of their own--how well did she ever know them? Can You make up for a past you don't really remember? It is Stuart who begins to fill in the details for Jill, including the fact that she's a well-known writer, although when she meets with her doctors, they say she may never write again. Against all odds, Jill Robinson retrieved her unique writing voice, and in this engaging memoir shows how she does it. She takes us with her on her exploration of'tlie connections between memory and creativity, celebrity and anonymity, and loss and discovery. From her first tentative steps outside her house on Wimpole Street to London's sleek West End. From a trip to Oxford to discuss memory with a professor to her amazing voyage to Los Angeles on an assignment for Vanity fair which takes her back to the sixties world of Hockney, Polanski, and Hopper, Jill forges new paths to memory. In Past Forgetting , Jill Robinson rediscovers friendships she doesn't know she Robert Redford tells her stories about her childhood; at John Lahr's London literary teas, she's reintroduced to the writer's world, and Cary Grant offers her memories of her father, Dore Schary. And being with Barbra Streisand reminds her of a time she doesn't quite when her father was running MGM. In her urgent voyage to redefine herself, Jill asks all the questions you've ever asked on the nature of memory. Is recollection shadowed by emotion? Is memory an act of reinvention? Do people reinvent rather than recollect? In Past Forgetting you'll find the answers and you'll meet a writer you won't want to forget.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction

288 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1999

Reviews

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was reaching a stride with some reading, and this book does not do much to maintain reading stride. Hint: It can be challenging to embrace the writing fragments, especially if you're unfamiliar with Jill Schary Robinson the writer, which I was, and more especially in the first portions of the book. Once you consider you're making progress, it's not a promissory for less careful reading. If I should be expected to appreciate something like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or The Sound and the Fury, however, the work required from the outlay of this book is minimal and in my vote, much more rewarding than other classic builds. During the first half, the narrative voice began to build a likeness to Jane Fonda's for me, as she's been playing in the Netflix program Grace & Frankie, a semblance which itself became vivid with humor, and a role which obviously follows this publication by many years. In this book, Jill Schary Robinson often reflects upon L.A. culture and assemblages, as well as East Coast influences ever-distinct among them, so it's also not an innuendo of mimicry but an imparting of semblance nonetheless, and it turns out Fonda was an early schoolmate. Theirs is a generation whereby people grew up as cohorts in a truer sense, with far less technological prevalence and globalism abound, with distinct presentations of West Coast, Californian or even Los Angeles personality, like you might encounter often-stereotyped generational ilks throughout various New York boroughs, or cadences and past times of Carolina or Virginia personalities. Jill several times reconciles her intermission of family time in Connecticut, made acceptable with a nod to Martha Stewart herself of course, and it ends up a preserved reference point for her daughter who decides to call the state home.

As a career writer, we gather Robinson focused on reflective magazine pieces and had a hard time crediting her craft for literature. We learn that she hosted radio very fondly for some time, and that she's had many gals rooting for her over the years, several with strong claims to their own fame of craft. With a sister that became a professional analyst (zipped lips,) Jill Schary Robinson explores where defined industry sexism - atop the layered tones of social pertinence - led her pursuit of art, and in the process she imbues multiple senses of talent upon the reader's pages. The fame of art was never really for her, is what we come to understand, but in the appreciation of fame she's defined value in society itself, around which she permits herself to organize... it very much is a social reflection for the times as much as her upbringing. Her identifiers early in the book, featuring what reviewers may cite as overt name dropping, are indeed her most frequent sound offs, as she searches her mind for what resonates most and then truest, and the beginning text gives a very strong sense of the drastic influx of shreds of memories and utterly randomized access to them, which is her sorting through the neural damage of a very severe (grand mal) seizure. It's left her to also sort through the diagnosis of epilepsy that's presented itself to her 3rd husband (sleeping beside her during a petit mal or two of which she was unaware) and has been indicated several times in her school years, handled with deference to herself most of all. With a distrust of medicine born of early faults in those even available to prescribe, and vivid haunts of speed addiction largely born from an epinephrine script for early asthma treatments (among cultural compulsions to be ever sharper, wittier, edgier,) the author doesn't reserve judgement but does in the course of the book come to credit herself with mastering modern-day options... the timing of all this revelation being after her parents have both passed.

Among the narrative, it's satisfying to read through where the author has sought truer understanding and assistance, open with many twists and turns in the journey of doing so, doctors aligned after some not, various academic experts with whom she is able to question or validate, and we see a remarkable valiance in facing the fears of a then highly-vulnerable mind that could turn completely inward at any time of attack. She suggests her mind may be ever-vulnerable, and it's a peace making of decades fully dredged of the insistence to present any compelling alternate reality. In fact, readers may find the book's most scenic recollections also provoke its most profound examinations of Personality, as the writer juxtaposes what could be considered culturally iconic recollections with her most intimate of personal memories and conceptions, neck-and-neck, striving to make best sense of herself between them. In presenting life as it presents itself to her, readers get several validations of its inner workings like clockwork, the tensions between relationships, the tight competition of a family generation wound very competitively, the wholesomeness of family times resown after deep gashes, the senses of community outside family, the outright painfulness of child-rearing among glaring conflicts of social expectations, the role if any of healthful aspiration among decades that seemed more like radar designed only to suit unwell pursuits.

When introduced to Robinson's husband Stuart, I could only picture Robert Redford and figure I lacked some serious imagination. In a way of things, it later in the book turns out that Robert Redford was of course part of Jill's (public) school childhood, and she was also quite forged into his bedrock of development, with her father (Isa)Dore Schary casting him in a Broadway production, after Schary's (stalwart) stint helming MGM studios and a subsequent return to his own beloved writing talent. The historical politics of this were also intriguing, the intervening nature of the United States government terribly unique in the way it also was during the Japanese internment, and it's another hallmark of human sociology that she visits on several meaningful occasions in the text. At least her father is a native of Newark, New Jersey with her mother also of New Jersey, both buried in West Long Branch. Another intriguing mention was of the Spanish flu, which impacted her father's first family, his mother falling ill with newborn at breast, since I've read this in America during the first summer of Covid-19. In this mystery puzzle of Jill Schary Robinson discovering who she is each day, and then eventually in reestablishing her bearing among much more intermittent spells as she terms them, readers might be compelled to look up items. The text in a couple locations reflects upon the Schary Manor catering business that was her father's upbringing outside New York City, and of course this is among a broader threaded reflection of what it's meant to be Jewish anywhere in America. Schary Robinson has even momentarily contrasted this with religious observance in London, which is itself intriguing due to how she's found London offering her a truer reflection for being Jewish. Stuart is not Jewish, nor was her prior husband with whom she co-wrote Bed/Time/Story, and the society which Jill's presented demonstrate many mechanisms by which she's endeavored an eventful life most of all. Linked to a society of marketed glamour that itself created expectation of more glamour, Jill presents endearing bread-and-butter moments behind the production of meaningful works when craft was as honed as celebrity. We come to understand she has not left this dedication behind, and that she very well intends to earn her keep.

Readers especially challenged about the personalities discussed in the book, have perhaps taken the book's title too literally. Also, it probably/very much should not be on an indigo blue cover, and it need *not* suggest a grandmother's scrapbook corners. Something more like her favorite table linens of her grandmother, so often visualized in many constructionist scenes, perhaps colliding with her favorite cars, the blue-green chair, the black leather couch that comes up somewhere, the kitchen counter of bespoke girl-power wherein her writing imperative re-ingrains... a cozy mystery style street cafe scene, where after you can expect every chapter to be paired with a suited cooking recipe. Anything else really, to attract more of her crowds inside the pages as she's found outside them walking through familiar metropolitan neighborhoods. I'm not sure the marketing's mattered to her as much as the act of entailing for those new to her, everything they might not realize without having known her thoughts so well, and Schary Robinson presents much of what motivates her forward in current life roles, what sets her back. The social manner by which she continually comes-to-terms with the present among different crowds and manner of relation, the surrogate family she avidly nurtures while navigating a preferred terrain all her own, is a high nod to years of effective analysis. In the midst of these shares, the writer's understanding is pillared with a gamut of gorgeous metaphors, tools that far beyond anecdotes serve to heighten achievements of understanding in her readers as well. She is not proving a point, she is allowing for the evident, and it makes for a highly relational telling of human coping, with unique highlights regarding common areas of remorse, the forging of new paths, and the longings that tend to define being human.

While the writer addresses Memory throughout the book's pursuits, and even with reasonably extensive focus on a mix of scientific approaches to categories for her recovery, she also very vividly addresses Identity, and the conversations of identity may very well encompass her most verdant among the writing, often searching for itself in such earnest, and so often in a way that highlights questions people raise time and again. In delving and circling in and so often, the book intones and explores deeper elements of human condition than often meet portrayals, even in the most intimate of formats such as memoir. We're accustomed to memoir suiting the high salute craving of self-definition amid controversy, and yet the 90s and beyond has presented A severe seizure has granted Jill Schary Robinson a portal by which she considers and reconsiders, accepts and challenges, remembers and forgives, in what ends up exploring vast opportunities of change and breathing life back into herself. The intact manner of literary components, meanwhile, are never in question. On a voyage of Identity, Jill Robinson embraces her makings as a writer and artist as readers can come to understand, without overly commanding explanations, the many intimate realizations she explores about her pursuit of craft, her life bloods; about the passions she's bypassed and the sense of self that her challenges in writing afford... her shared epiphanies on the near-absolute obliteration that the present indicates to the past of any place at any one time. It is in Jill Robinson's frame-by-frame efforts of recollection that readers experience the perspective of such decades among definable American cities. Among interjections of vast historical prevalence in L.A, and a more contained sampling of London blocks over just one decade, an amazing interplay of life presents with Jill Robinson as conductor. There's cultural reflection of industry impacts, as well as main street and varied bohemian reflections, and in being her person, Jill Schary Robinson rediscovers her person, not as a swath of memory comes flooding back perfectly intact, but as she comes to understand the functional ways of human memory generally, the methods by which she reclaims herself among that functioning, and the ways by which she makes peace with (and room for) future life stages she can outright savor.

I encountered The Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff earlier this year, in which the narrative voice does not journal but still recalls a lot of prior experiences. As an analyst plenty in regard of patient rights, Liedloff is also a writer imparting studies and reflections that redefined parent-child relations for enough of the developed world. Liedloff features several asides of findings most eminent among years of clinical practice. In one of these relational highlights, Liedloff relays the happenstance of health events during times of dramatic life change, be it total redress or subtleties that present more dramatic change than otherwise understood. In this light, I was not surprised at Schary Robinson's outright negotiations of being a grandmother, and how different the experience seems to her at that point in time than any other that she's identified with such bearings. Nor at her reflections of motherhood and variably focused landscapes of it, the vacillating sensibilities wherein she accepts regenerative concepts in ways that might honor her, and in ways we can come to sense are less emotionally exhausting to herself. Self-exhaustion is a topic visited often by the writer, whose found herself excessively prone to fits of temper in every romance, and whose grown to expect it as a boundary test for any of her closest gatherings. All in all, it's such an honest and female depiction of a life also lived with immense honesty, celebratory in its humanity and attentive to every facet thereof. With Kate Hudson depicting ultimate groupies, odes to Twiggy, and the outright rehash of Seventies adoration that's so soon followed initiations of glamping at Coachella in fur boots and vests fit least of all for the southwest desert sun, it's perhaps been more the time for a memoir such as this.

[Lily · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book because it is told as a memoir, and the narrative evolves as Jill's memory healing develops. This makes it seem as if the reader is somewhat on the same learning curve that Jill went through. It was very informative about trauma that the brain faces through epilepsy, such trauma I had never known about. Epilepsy was one (and may still be to an extent) of those diseases that was not talked about during the past eras. I suppose that was because it was not only a mystery to us, but that it was somewhat frightening to see or to be a part of. In fact, there seems to have been a hint of it in my family's past that has never been fully addressed. This may have made the story that much more interesting to me.
Jill came from a privileged background in Hollywood, so some of her unfolding story included fascinating tidbits from her years there. She was also a part of the 60's and 70's culture, whose eras shaped the way America and the world evolved, in some good ways and in some bad ways. She has not had a life to emulate, but sometimes one can learn from others' mistakes. One instance that weaved throughout Jill's book was how she realized she was an absent mother to her children, but that each had learned through that to be the parent that she was not.

[Florence Buchholz · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was very fragmented. I never got a clear idea of what Jill's life was life before or after her 'grand mal' seizure that resulted in a loss of memory. I hesitate to criticize the book too strongly because it seems to have been written while she was dealing with the effects of memory loss. One thing I do criticize strongly, though, is her name dropping. She keeps mentioning celebrities that she knows and designer clothing that she prefers. It was hard for someone like me, who was not a Hollywood brat and was not delivered to school in a limosine, to identify with her boasting.

[John Ziemba · Rating 2 out of 5]

What a slog to read. Had to force myself to finish it. After Jill died I read her obituary and thought, what an interesting life, I'll check out one of her books. This was about a person who wakes up in the hospital after having a seizure and has total amnesia. Sounds like an interesting situation. She may be a great writer on another subject, I don't know, but I have zero curiosity after reading this.
The book is largely written in a stream of conscieness style and jumps all over, in time, place, and characters. Maybe if you know her back story really well you can follow this, but I couldn't. She knows a lot of famous people and name drops constantly, but doesn't say anything very interesting about them. The eleiteism is dripping off the pages, IMO. She goes on and on about what clothes she is wearing, by what designers,what she is eating, who she knows, where she has been, and with whom. I guess color is very important to her because she talks about the color of everything. I just couldn't get into it.
I've read 1000's of books, but never read an author who talks so much about the process of writing. It was almost like a writers workshop for writers suffering from writers block. Technically she's probably a good writer, but I don't care about the process that much.
Not a book for me

[Nanci Robertson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Couldn't even read the whole book; gave up in the middle.